City versus countryside.

The civilization of classical Antiquity (both Greek and Roman) cannot be understood without the idea of polis, urbs or city:

To Roman citizens, the place to be was a Roman city or villa. The pagus, the uncultivated countryside, inevitably suggested discomfort and hardship. The inhabitants of the pagus —pagani, or pagans— were country bumpkins, rustic, unrealiable, threatening. Roman Christians assumed this prejudice without examing it.

(Cahill: p. 107)

Now, this is something we may be at risk of forgetting in certain societies these days. Thanks in part to the environmentalist movement, anything rural is in. Some young people's dream is to move to a small property in the countryside and live there, surrounded by a calm life and closer to nature. Even more people's idea of a better life is to live somewhere in the suburbs, away from the stress and pollution of city life, and yet close enough to benefit from it services. One way or another, the idea has been gaining ground in the last couple of decades or so.

To a great extent, the movement that proclaims the need to return to the countryside is guided by an utopian view of what life there means. Simply put, those who were born and grew in the city are so used to certain perks that they take them for granted. However, the reality still is that, in spite of all the advances experienced in the last twenty or thirty years, life in the countryside is hard, especially if one has to live from nature's own fruits. And let's not even talk about the lack of dynamism of the economy in the country, which makes it far more difficult to find a decent job. It shouldn't surprise no one, then, that a significant amount of those who fled the city to go live in the countryside are actually professionals who saved enough and can afford some decent living there. In other words, hardly the majority of the population.

In any case, I find it important to emphasize that the city, with all its problems (yes, the pollution, criminality and high density) has given us so much: laws, political institutions, democracy, universities, technology, science, places to debate, to meet, to enjoy the diversity that can only be seen in the large cities. What sort of society would we live in without our cities? What would be the effect of large sums of people fleeing to live in the countryside? Yes, something tells me that it would be akin to a return to the Dark Age, something not so different from what happened in the Mediterranean region back then.

An empire that turned its back on the outside.

In page 12, Cahill shares a thought about the natural inward-looking approach of the Romans that should serve as a caution to us in the present too:

For all the splendor of Roman standard, the power of Roman boot, and the extent of Roman road, the entire empire hugs the Mediterranean like a child's village of sand, waiting to be swept into the sea. From fruitful Gaul and Britain in the north to the fertile Nile Valley in the south, from the ricky Iberian shore in the west to the parched coasts of Asia Minor, all provinces of the empire turn toward the great sea, toward Medi-Terra-nea —the Sea of Middle Earth. And as they turn to the center of their world, they turn back on all that lies behind them, beyond the Roman wall. They turn their back on the barbarians.

(Cahill: p. 12)

Great empires and large countries always tend to ignore what lies beyond their borders, considering it worthless or, at least, of less value, inferior to their own clearly superior ways and manners. This is a permanent danger in History, something that afflicted Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries and it may afflict the United States now. We should be careful here though. This is not a Western defect only, as many multiculturalists would have it nowadays. The old Chinese Empire also viewed itself as the center of the world, to the point that it referred to itself as the Empire of the Middle, and something similar can be said of the Japanese. Quite to the contrary, this is a very human fault, something intrinsic to human nature and not to this or that particular nationality or culture.

How the Irish Saved the World.

Part of a wider project that the author calls The Hinges of History, where he sets to study and "retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West" (a project that, in principle, also includes a second volume titled The Gifts of the Jews), this book tells us the story of how the Irish monks managed to keep the heritage of Western civilization (i.e., the Greek and Roman classics, as well as the Jewish and early Christian works) to pass it to posterity.

Technical description:
Title: How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe.
Author: Thomas Cahill.
Publisher: Doubleday
Edition: First paperback edition, New York (USA), March 1996.
Pages: 249 pages, including index and illustrations.
ISBN: 0-385-41849-3